The digital-wallet business is rough — just ask Google

The other significant barrier that Google Wallet faces is a lack of cooperation from the carriers. While a decent amount of Android, Blackberry and Windows Phones have NFC enabled in their hardware, only Sprint allows Google Wallet on devices. Having to battle with other carriers, on top of other wallet companies and Apple, with its own forays into Passbook, will further stretch Google Wallet as it struggles to find a steady audience that has access to the product.

Like many of its now-shuttered projects, Google Wallet may have entered the mobile-payments market too early and too strong to make a real play at domination. Forrester Research estimates the space will hit $90 billion by 2017, but that’s a long time to wait and see if a major investment will turn around — even, perhaps, for Google.

Today, a report from Businessweek showed the cracks in one of Google’s most spirited and cutting-edge products. Google Wallet, it seems, is a “money pit.” The team is now forced to make tough decisions about how to move forward with the product, potentially scrapping projects designed to encourage digital wallet adoption.

It’s been a rough few years for the digital wallet space in general. Smaller companies like Dwolla and LevelUp have a hard time reaching out to educate their audience and expand their consumer base, according to a study by ComScore. PayPal, with the most name recognition out of all, has investors unsure of success in the onsite payments business according to Mercury News. Even buzzy payments provider Square, boasting of processing mobile transactions upwards of $8 billion per year, has only 3 million Square Wallet users as of last year, according to CNET. But perhaps no company has felt…